The Limits of Aurality

A sound studies symposium

10:00 - Coffee & opening remarks

10:30 - Milena Droumeva
11:00 - Alexander Fisher
11:30 - Elisa Ferrari with Allison Collins
12:00 - Rob Stone

12:30 - Lunch for presenters at Tuc Craft Kitchen

14:00 - Lief Hall
14:30 - Godfre Leung
15:00 - Tobias Ewé

15:30 - Break

15:45 - Eldritch Priest
16:15 - Saygin Salgirli
16:45 - Ted Hiebert

18:00 - Dinner
20:00 - After party at Selectors' Records (8 East Pender St.)

Much ado has been made of aurality in recent years. This is due in part to the way attention to sonic experience appears to open new critical paths and modes of thought that are otherwise unavailable to ocular and logocentric forms of analysis and interpretation. However, an aurally-inflected take on the construction of personhood, the composition of human and nonhuman relations, or the metaphysics of life, for example, is motivated as much by an urge to invent new concepts as it is by the perceived limits of any given theoretical model. This is to suggest that aurality’s reimagining of thought’s critical limits is as much an aesthetic as a critical matter. Given this we can ask what the invocation of aurality does at the level of style and substance, and whether its contemporary conceptualization is adequate to the cultures practices of the 21st century.

For this one-day symposium we will gather academics (and artists) working within the field of sound studies (broadly construed) to address questions regarding the limits of aurality.